01 Jun How to fail and get back up
Do not judge me by my success,
judge me by how many times
I fell down and got back up again.
― Nelson Mandela
I’ve been thinking a lot about resilience. Resilience has a lot of names…fortitude, strength, hardiness, tenacity, and my personal favorite, grit.
Resilience refers to our ability to bounce back after adversity and challenging times. I think we can all acknowledge that the past two years have been some of the toughest we’ve endured collectively.
Like me, I bet this isn’t the first time you’ve been knocked down.
In the winter of 2014, I sat and held my Daddy’s hand when we unplugged his life support and I watched his physical body slip away. I’m convinced his soul had already departed at that point and he was nearby as we all said our goodbye’s by his bedside.
My Mama would quietly pass in her sleep less than four months later, literally dying from a broken heart.
I was thrust back in the throes of loss. A land I was becoming very familiar with.
Shortly after, I was at the library when a book nearly fell into my lap. It was titled “The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss.” I took it home and quickly devoured it.
George Bonanno is a psychologist and pioneering researcher in the field of bereavement and trauma. We’re all taught that the mourning process is largely about moving through the five stages of grief….denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And we’re taught that this will likely be a long, arduous, grueling process.
I found that this didn’t line up with my experience at all.
Bonanno’s book helped me to see that my sadness was normal, but so was my feelings of relief and peace. His research shows that most humans are incredibly resilient at bouncing back from tremendous loss. His research shows that resilience is not a rare trait in some, but a common one. He proves over and over just how adaptable, flexible, and resilient the human species is.
Being resilient doesn’t mean that we put on a happy face and reject unpleasant feelings. It means we accept and allow all feelings to flow through us.
Feeling these harder emotions actually grows our ability to be more resilient largely because we prove to ourselves that we can feel the most uncomfortable of feelings, and live through it.
We’ve all fallen down. Battered, bruised, and bleeding.
We all have the ability to get back up. Feel like shit. Take a breath, dust ourselves off, rest as needed, then put one foot in front of the other. To make meaning and move forward with a bigger perspective.
And if you need to see proof of someone literally falling, getting back up and winning then watch this inspiring clip. I think it’s one of the best in sports.